A scene from the play, The Tiger Lillies Perform Hamlet is presented. (Photo/wuzhenfestival.com)
The Wuzhen Theater Festival recently released this year's theme and performance list. Focusing on "Gaze Beyond", nearly 80 performances of 22 plays from Germany, France, Russia, Spain, Japan, Poland, Switzerland, Australia, Lithuania, Romania, Chile and the Netherlands, will be shown from Oct 13 to 22 this year, which sets a new record of hosting scale in its history. Meanwhile, the young theater artists' competition, the Wuzhen dialogues and workshops, outdoor carnivals will be held.
Lin Zhaohua, China's most famous theater director, was invited as honorary chairman of this year's festival. His new play, Doctor Gordo, or Six Persons looking for the 18th Camel, will premier during the festival.
To broaden performance space, Wuzhen transformed the World Internet Conference Centre into the Internet Theater, where the Russian play, Mother Earth, will be shown. Special court plays such as Kaligula, will be provided at the Traditional Storytelling Hall. More outdoor plazas, like the Water Theater and Shi Tian Square, will be explored in the future.
This year's specially invited plays cover four differently themed series - the new classics "At This Moment", Shakespeare classics "Impressed for 400 years", space and body series "The Power of Silence" and the discovery series "The World Where We Exist".
The first theme includes Der Spierer, directed by German modern theater master Frank Castorf; An Enemy of the People, directed by Jan Klata and performed by the Norodowy Stary Teatr; Kaligula, created by Lithuanian new generation director Vidas Bareikis and Don Quixote, by Spanish director Carles Alfaro.
The second includes The Tiger Lillies Perform Hamlet, brought by the Theater of the Republic from Denmark and the British rock band The Tiger Lilies; the puppet show The Tempest from Romania; King Lear, by Chinese young director Dou Hui and Hamlet Machine by Chen Henghui, the art director of the Hong Kong's Alice Theatre Laboratory.
In the third series, themed "the Power of Silence", there are Mother Earth, directed by Sergey Zemlyansky from the Moscow Drama Theatre of A.S Pushkin; Blind, produced by the Black Hole Theatre of Australia and Duda Paiva Theatre of the Netherlands; The Dictionary of Soul, directed by Li Ning and performed by the Physical Guerrillas and Papa's Time-Machine, designed by Ma Liang, a renowned Chinese conceptual photographer and visual artist.
The last series, "The World Where We Exist" will arouse wild imagination. It includes Writing in Water, created by Lai Shengchuan, permanent chairman of Wuzhen Theater Festival and He Jiong, a famous Chinese host of the entertainment program. In addition, Legends and Rumors, the Swiss play, The Thundering Glaciers, the French play and Drift Home, an Internet play will be performed.
